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First a short-introduction for people who aren’t familiar with Whiskey.

Whiskey is a powerful test runner for Node.js applications. It supports async testing, code coverage, scope leaks reporting, Makefile generation, test timing and lot more. Be sure to check out the github page which lists all the features.

New version (0.6.0) which has been released today includes a process runner and a support for managing external test dependencies. Test dependency is any kind of process on which the (integration) tests depend on.

Examples include, but are not limited to:

database,

some kind of api server,

web server,

other external services

Process runner is configured using a simple JSON configuration file. Most of the options have sane default values, which means if you don’t have any special requirements you can configure it very quickly.

Example configuration file which we use for our monitoring system integration test suite at Rackspace can be found here.

Each process can also specify its dependencies in the depends option which allows Whiskey to start unrelated processes concurrently.

Before Whiskey process runner was available we have been using scons for managing and running all the test dependencies. Test dependencies related section in our SConstruct file was long and hard to maintain which means switching to Whiskey process runner was a nice improvement.

Process runner can be used by passing --dependencies <configuration_file_path.json> option to whiskey binary. By default all the dependencies specified in the configuration file are started, but there is also --only-esential-dependencies option available which will make Whiskey first inspect the test files and only start the processes which are required by the tests which will be ran.

Each test file can specify on which processes it depends by exporting dependencies attribute. This attribute must be an array and contain the names of the processes as defined in the configuration file.

If you have any questions or suggestions you can find me on #Node.js IRC channel on freenode (nick Kami_). If you find a bug or a problem you can also open an ticket on the project issue tracker.